Monster Video: Your Job Description is your Company Brand

Writing a Job Description

What if you thought of the job description as marketing collateral and the job title as your product name?

In this Monster video, Jon Picoult, Founder and Principal of Watermark Consulting, offers his insights on creating a job description and job title that best reflects your company’s purpose and company brand.

I like to say to people that if you go with this analogy -- that talent acquisition is a business like any other -- then your job titles are really your product names and your job descriptions are your marketing collateral.

And so you need to pay as much attention to those as you would when you’re actually naming one of the products that you’re putting out there in the market place -- or drafting your marketing material to promote it.

And very often, businesses don’t do that. They view, for example, a job description as an administrative document. They’re boring, they’re bland -- they convey basic, almost legally-required information, but they don’t have a marketing spin to them.

And I’m not suggesting that you exaggerate, I’m not suggesting that you convey any kind of inaccurate information.

The point is you can make a job description specific and accurate and detailed with what somebody would do on a day-to-day basis.

But for example, beyond detailing what they should do, what about detailing why they do it. What’s the purpose of the job? Not just what’s the nature of the job -- but what’s the purpose?

Very often, people like to be part of something that’s bigger than themselves.

The notion of being able to work for a company and operate in a role where I have a sense of meaning to what I’m doing -- a sense of purpose -- that can be really powerful for people and attract them to a particular company or a particular job.

Rarely do you see job descriptions that ever talk about purpose. But I think that’s a powerful way to market an opportunity.

The same can be said with job titles. As an example, try this job title on for size: assume that you were in the human resources function. How would you feel about two jobs -- the exact same thing --how would you feel about a job that is called a “Personnel Recruiter?”

Now, what if somebody came to you -- with the exact same job -- but they said the title of THIS job is “Talent Scout.”

Those create very different impressions in people. And I think it points to the notion that the words and labels that you use throughout an organization in general, but certainly even for job titles, give you an opportunity to shake people’s thoughts about that opportunity.

And again, I’m not suggesting that you aggrandize something and create a title that just doesn’t make any sense. But you can inject some creativity. And you can avoid words that have negative connotations in the job title, you can be careful about that, at least avoid those.

But by choosing a job title carefully, and by crafting a job description thoughtfully, it’s another way to get your company brand out there and help people say, “Wow, this company is different, this business is really different. And this is a job I’m interested in learning more about. “